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Log versus Level in VAR Forecasting: 42 Million Empirical Answers - Expect the Unexpected

The use of log-transformed data has become standard in macroeconomic forecasting with VAR models. However, its appropriateness in the context of out-of-sample forecasts has not yet been exposed to a thorough empirical investigation. With the aim of filling this void, a broad sample of VAR models is employed in a multi-country set up and approximately 42 million pseudo-out-of-sample forecasts of GDP ...

SOEP data used on many conferences 2014

The SOEP data remain an interesting start point for research from many areas. The high number of presentations with SOEP data on national and international conferences show proof for that. On the following website you can see a composition of presentations held on basis of the SOEP data: Please click here

Love Thy Neighbor: Religion and Prosocial Behavior

There is a long tradition in psychology, the social sciences and, more recently though, economics to hypothesize that religion enhances prosocial behavior. Evidence from both survey and experimental data however yield mixed results and there is barely any evidence for Germany. This study adds to this literature by exploring data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which provides both attitudinal ...

The Effects of Elite Sports on Later Job Success

This paper analyses the income effect of the participation in elite sports. To quantify the average difference in the monthly net income of former elite athletes and non-athletes we estimate sample average treatment effect scores (SATT) by using covariate nearest-neighbour matching (CVM). While our treatment group consists of formerly funded top-level athletes, the control group of non-athletes is ...

How Does Fuel Taxation Impact New Car Purchases? An Evaluation Using French Consumer-Level Data

This study evaluates the impact of fuel prices on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly registration of new private cars in France from 2003 to 2007. Detailed information on the car holder enables us to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers. We identify demand parameters through the large oil price fluctuations of this period. We find that the sensitivity ...

The Impact of Extreme Weather Events on Children’s Height: Evidence from Mongolia

Shocks experienced during early childhood can harm the long term growth of children. We examine the potential impact of extreme weather events on children’s height,taking the example of Mongolia, which is frequently plagued by extreme winters. Our focus is on the unusually harsh winter of 2009/10, which caused the deaths of over 10 million animals, approximately 23.9 percent of the country’s entire ...

Extreme Winters Affect Children’s Height: Six Questions to Kati Krähnert

Forced Displacement Detrimental to the Health of Children in Colombia

Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced refugees in the world after Syria. The decade-long ongoing armed conflict between the Colombian police and the armed forces, paramilitaries, and guerilla groups has caused 5.7 million people—more than ten percent of the population—to flee their homelands. Many of them are women and children, driven off their lands, in most cases, to the misery ...

Impact of Education Programs in Colombian Conflict Areas: Children Attend School More Frequently But Performance Has Barely Improved

Policy programs in developing countries aimed at supporting certain sectors of the population in individual areas play a crucial role in development cooperation. Examples include programs to improve access to education. But what impact do such programs really have? The present study by DIW Berlin examines the impact of a welfare program on the learning success and participation of children in Colombian ...

Violent Conflicts Increase the Risk of Domestic Violence in Colombia

Over the past 50 years, Colombian society has experienced a violent conflict between government forces and right-wing paramilitary groups on the one hand, and left-wing guerrilla groups on the other. Moreover, a high proportion of women in Colombia are victims of domestic violence. The present study examines whether there is a correlation between the conflict and violence against women. The findings ...